UW Team Builds Massive Speaker, Makes Marty McFly Jealous

Remember the opening scene from Back to the Future where Marty plays his guitar through that giant speaker in Doc Brown’s lab? Well, a group of engineers at the University of Wisconsin sure do, and they decided to try and recreate the experience with their own enormous speaker.

Kyle Hanson, Dan Ludois and a team of students at UW created this this 8-foot-tall speaker last year for the UW Engineering Expo. They had to create a huge voice coil driver out of fiberglass, wrapped with 18 gauge copper wire, and then attached it to a large speaker cone made from polycarbonate. Though this giant speaker isn’t capable of launching Michael J. Fox across the room – it actually can play sounds. Dan says it works best from only about 5Hz up to 50Hz, so it’s really an enormous subwoofer.

I like how it’s been embellished with rope lights in tribute to the design of the flux capacitor. The total budget for the build was just $600, which is pretty impressive when you think about just how massive this thing truly was. You can read more about the build and check out more pics over at Dan Ludois’s website.